4 ms·
People will get fired due to hallucinated bad reports, won't they.
by rf15 3y ago
People will get fired due to hallucinated bad reports, won't they.
- ryanjshaw 3y agoMicrosoft specifically point out it's named "copilot" because it's there to assist you, not replace you. You still need to check the work and decide whether to put your name behind it or not.
- ourmandave 3y agoThis is emphasized in every "What is Copilot?" article or video I've seen. The not so fine print is Copilot may return garbage and it's up to you to confirm the results.
- latency-guy2 3y agoWell, I wouldn't really expect it. Its customer data, and it can technically be anything. Imagine making a system that is expected to be reliably excellent at generating things within that domain. It is already a very hard problem that I can confidently say is unsolved, and probably not even as good as a human can sort things. Even in a good dataset that is unstructured and unlabelled you will face issues in just a single domain (e.g. vision tasks trying to classify a variety of vehicles), imagine that being extended to a wide variety of subjects that can mix and match. I imagine at most, it'll be a reputation hit.
- Delphiza 3y agoMachine-generated or people-generated hallucinations? You would be surprised at how bad most existing reports in business are - and people don't get fired for those.
- thuuuomas 3y agoThis tedious, snarky response is neither clever nor insightful. Like, we get it - you resent your coworkers & consider them beneath you. Hopefully, your unique, elite output keeps you employable for a few quarters longer than them.
- ehutch79 3y agoNo, it’s a legit gripe. I’m routinely asked to make reports, but things stall when I ask, “so what do you actually need to see on the report, and where should the data come from”. A lot of people out there are kind of cargo cutting their way through things.
- andybak 3y agoI didn't read the comment as especially snarky. Your response was both snarky and personal which I think comes across much worse.
- hdhuwgdue2 3y agoI don't think parent was trying to be clever. In my neck of the woods various reports have to be massaged hard to account for some of stupid data decisions in the old times. You would be amazed how many issued we identified so far and our mgmt uncharacteristically wants us to bring up issues. Some companies kill their messengers. So yeah.. I absolutely buy that a portion of business reports are of low quality.
- nicklecompte 3y agoI have not gotten fired for a bad report, but I certainly made mistakes in reports/Excel sheets that were intended as customer-facing deliverables. The good thing is that my coworkers checked my work and often noticed mistakes - not always, once an angry customer noticed my mistake, and my boss chewed out my coworkers for being lazy. Obviously humans are not foolproof. But if I was making mistakes, say, in 5% of my facts and figures...I probably would have been reassigned to other work. 5% is way too high for an Excel sheet: it makes the model completely useless. It often takes more effort to audit and fix 5% of busted Excel cells than it does to just rebuild the model from scratch. GPT-4/Copilot/Gemini/etc almost certainly make more than 5% errors for any real use case. I am sure there are many bad organizations with lower standards than the organizations I worked at. My concern is that good organizations will adopt technology like GPT, inadvertently lowering their standards because they trusted a machine they didn't understand. It's very worrying that good people are rationalizing this choice by saying "well humans are also unreliable" without putting specific numbers to it. 5% errors in document summarization is not good enough for human workers, and it certainly shouldn't be good enough for software.
- eviks 3y agoPeople are already killed and jailed due to garbage machine-generated data, so why would firing be off the dump?